Introduction

There are certain people, and writers who are deemed relevant by the society they happen to appear to represent.  Sometimes, these writers are realized in later years for words that transcended the need of the time, people recall Fitzgerald and Steinbeck even today. Alexander Trellis was one who was forgotten more easily.

He had in him that certain look of affability that washes off from people who are short and have sweet voices, and in his writing, there was a certain kindness towards the struggles of others.  He was not particularly intelligent, but he was alert to something in the needs of people in that generation, and he assuaged their false wounds, and reaffirmed their self esteem with big smiles and sweet words.
It was nice for people in the age he was popular in to see that this writer had a wife he’d often quote, who was not particularly pretty, and two children he’d sent to the finest schools in Boston.  He got attention. 

Of course a man cannot be estimated in an image, but he was by all means a decent person by a flimsy standard.  The other house he kept with his mistress was outside of Boston, and it was never mentioned to his wife or children, in a day in age when he loved his wife and could still have a mistress if he never told anyone. 

When the era he had been accepted by disappeared and the reviews found his novels tried, and the public did not buy his books, he became aware that things were different.  It didn’t matter that he was not the man he was portrayed to be, it mattered that his gift was portraying him, even before the man he really was, more representative of the new selfish order that took over.

But it was as if this time that had accepted him had never really existed, because it was quick to pass away.

The moment the society changed, and the moment people didn’t respond to his smile, and the moment people didn’t like him, he developed a sore.

There had always been a score somewhere in him, something forgotten in distraction and with the adulation of the American public.  He must have known he wasn’t very smart, and he certainly knew he did not like people, but any man if told he is great, forgets this. 

The changes that made him the deeply bruised and anxious man he was at his death, did not take place immediately.  He knew how to play his part, and played it more convincingly than he ever had.  He smiled more brightly to passers-by, and dropped his mistress and fine-tuned his next novel with all the blind love desperation can produce, but it was evident within a year or two that people did not like him for his friendliness, and in this time he was vulnerable.  And he didn’t have the courage to publish the book again.

Men are incapable of shame, they do not have consciences or feel vulnerable because they have hurt others, and they are vulnerable because they are not adored. 

Alexander killed his marriage easily enough.  He wasn’t ever in love with his wife, and he didn’t really see much of his children who spent most of the year in boarding schools, and he didn’t think twice before he used his money to introduce a mistress into the house.  He’d come home in the middle of the day and bring her to the master bed with the door open for his wife to see.  His wife successfully received most of his money in the divorce by the legally corrupt ruling of a sympathetic judge who had once fervently read Alexander’s novels, and was disgusted to him now.

Alexander was probably attached to the idea of his own goodness.  He probably still to some degree felt badly that after his divorce, he went to the prostitutes, and that deep down he was the man he was ten years earlier, but he didn’t think much.  It didn’t require thinking, and he wasn’t very good at it anyway. It was amazing how many sores they filled, all the cheap, repressed things that were bottled up in his soul were suddenly taken away, the weight of old age seemed to leave him, and he just went his way. 

There is something complex to the mystery of every woman.  If it is the writer’s vision to understand a universal theme of internal conflict in the human soul, to understand elements of self-analysis, and blindness to self, to understand the secret self, and the projected one, then he has special interest with women.  He must look to a woman who can convince one man with one destructive glance that he is a knight who can rescue her from her loneliness, and to another find herself incapable, consumed with love.  If a writer is to understand evil it is in a woman, and it is with a woman that he must find grace.

Isn’t it logical that a physically and intellectually perfect woman might carry a deeper mystery; that with perfect knowledge of the inner workings of people around her, might more deeply resent that she is a mystery to herself?  Might there not be deeper insecurities in place of her stability in her attractiveness and intelligence? 
When Isabelle caused the stir she did in this world, she did so without miscalculation.  If any of the men she profoundly affected knew they were of use to her, and many probably did, they would not have let themselves believe it.  One could not have looked at her for long before it seemed impossible for her to do wrong.

It is probable that many literary visions of angelic and monstrous proportions were inspired by brief and intense memories of her.

When Alexander first saw Isabelle, it was as if a spark had come to him.  There was this impossibly pretty girl who was dressed in the sort of clothes women used to wear, the delicate pink and youthful formal wear once seen even in the day.  In fact it was impossible not to notice how intricately beautiful she was.  Even the straps to her dress were entwined with vines and flowers, romantic, and demure.

“I know you,” she said, “You’re Alexander Trellis.” 

There must have been a thread of steel in her silken vocal chords, because Alexander could feel himself exposed.  He could not keep from looking at her, but he bent his shoulders forward, and tried to avoid her eyes.

“I used to watch you on the television.  You were so personable and insightful, and I thought of you when you talked about your marriage, and I had this feeling of happiness.”  She had made sure that she had sharpened the sound of her voice.  When he began to convulse, she knelt down to find tears in his eyes.  She didn’t have to fake the smile that came after as she kneeled in front of him.  He coughed and buried his head into her shoulders and she gazed out into the distance...